Was Twain the first author to write of Zombies?

Question

Although the word is not used, Twain's zany novel of title-frenzy and mad-scientist capitalistic schemes *The American Claimant* (sequel to *The Gilded Age*) describes the intent by the megalomaniac Mulberry Sellers to "materialize" dead people for use as cheap labor. He intends to contract these would-be minions of his out as policemen and soldiers and such, thus saving city and national governments big money while reaping a giant profits for himself.Is this 1892 novel the first to include "zombies" among its characters?Actually, these "zombies" never really materialize - they remain figments of Mulberry's overfertile imagination; yet still, as far as the concept goes, is this the "advent of the zombies"?If so, Twain was not only ahead of his time, again, but a case could be made that he foresaw the inroads that robots would make into the labor market (if you stretch or conflate "zombies" to "robots").

Answer 1

Mark Twain may have written about zombie-like creatures, but he never used that term. The first appearance of the word “Zombi” occurred in a novel entitled, “Le Zombi du Grand Perou, ou la comtesse de Cocagne” written by Pierre-Corneille Blessebois in 1697.  In his story, Blessebois does not clearly define the word Zombi beyond the idea of an evil spirit.  However, we can understand from Blessebios’ book that the Zombi was a very important character in Caribbean culture in the late 1600s.

The word "Zombi" is first found in an English publication in 1819, in History of Brazil by Robert Southey. The first book to expose Western culture to the voodoo zombie was The Magic Island (1929), by W. B. Seabrook.  This is the sensationalized account of a man who discovers voodoo cults in Haiti, and their supernatural slaves.